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IPv6 Network Administration Review by Alfred S. Jones
Poor treatment of IPv6 itself, halfway decent for IPv4 to IPv6 transition options
I bought this book to understand IPv6 so I know the meaning behind the various vendor-specific IPv6 knobs I will have to tweak in the near future, e.g. Cisco, Microsoft, *nix etc. I was misled by the "..Network Administration" in the title. Which, to me, usually represents a book with how-tos - and relevant rationale - pertaining to IPv6 on various platforms. A better title for this book is: "IPv6 - Planning Your Transition".
What I got instead was sort of a relaxed technical rambling from a couple of guys that clearly know IPv6 but don't know the next thing about how to teach others about it. (Think of two super-qualified IPv6 experts musing aloud about IPv6 while sitting in comfy leather chairs, wearing cardigans with elbow patches, beside a crackling fireplace, in a mountain cabin, in snowy weather.) I suffered through two whole chapters of the obligatory pros and cons of IPv4 at the beginning only to see IPv6's workings disposed off in a single chapter. Albeit with promises that we would "..get down to the juicy details later in Chapters 4 and 6." No such luck I'm afraid.
The book also suffers from a particularly acute case of let-me-tell-why-this-is-great that most engineers suffer from when asked to explain what they've come up with. Here's a quote from chapter 3's second paragraph to illustrate the point:
"When we talk about networking protocols in general it's important to understand the difference between specification and implementation."
Ummm, yes, if you are implementing the blasted thing. Not so much if you are a technical user of it. I knew I was in trouble after this point in the book.
So I excused myself, left the mountain cabin and took the cable car back into town. I hightailed it to the nearest bookstore and bought myself "Understanding IPv6, Second Edition" by Joseph Davies from Microsoft Press. Now here is a book that disposes off the obligatory IPv4 pros and cons in a couple of pages and gets to the meat of the matter in no time, i.e the actual workings of IPv6, its fields, their meanings and how they are used. As an added bonus, this book also does a great job of covering IPv6 transition options.
Buy "Understanding IPv6, Second Edition" and save your money. Or better, send me a postage paid book envelope and I'll send you my copy of "IPv6 Network Administration".